Landmark day: Drupal arrives to Beastwithin.org

So, I’ve been a bit out of the loop, but it looks like the weirdest thing imaginable is happening and Movable Type 6 will not be open source - though Movable Type Open Source 5 will remain available on GitHub (ref 1, ref 2).

Most of my blogs are currently based on MTOS 5, having been tossed around various content management systems so many times. And I hoped that I would not need to switch around yet again, but since MTOS 5’s future is in the hands of the open source community, I’ve decided that one of the most viable strategies I had would be to just move my stuff to some other content management system. After all, MT suffered an user diaspora when licences were last time messed with, and even when MT 4 was open source, a pre-MT5 fork (Melody) ended up mysteriously ceasing its development.

But here’s the thing: beastwithin.org is a really huge mish-mash of static HTML and really random choices of content management systems and scripts. It’d be nice if the stuff was stored in a single nice industrial-grade content management system. To wit, Drupal.

I’ve previously moved the Avarthrel site (static HTML generation through Webgen) and blog content (Melody, then MTOS 5) to Drupal, so I know the process isn’t that difficult in theory.

So here’s a landmark day: the main website is now under Drupal’s hands. This is the first time in the site’s history that the site root is being dynamically handled. And it was totally painless, too!

Sub-content will likely be moved to Drupal eventually, and will likely be moved out from under my “personal” webpage to some more interesting URL locations. I do try to keep all old links to my stuff working properly - don’t worry about that!